THOUSAND OAKS, Calif.—As Angel City’s practice wraps up on a Thursday afternoon, forward Christen Press pads around the field barefoot. Most of the team heads for the weight room, but head coach Alexander Straus hangs back to chat with one of his midfielders. Meanwhile, sporting director Mark Parsons debriefs with his latest acquisition, checking in on how her first couple of weeks with the team have been going.
The relative calm in Thousand Oaks belies what has been a turbulent couple of months. A blue-and-white lightning bolt ripped through the Los Angeles sports scene last month when Chelsea signed away striker Alyssa Thompson. The departure was sudden and somewhat acrimonious, and since Thompson absconded, Angel City’s playoff hopes have faded. Press and the club’s first captain, Ali Riley, have also announced their retirements. But Angel City remains one of the most valuable women’s sports franchises in the world.
So as the dust settles and the roster transforms, who are some of the individuals reshaping the team as it prepares for its next chapter?
Annenberg Media spoke with Straus, Parsons, defender Evelyn Shores and forward Sveindís Jónsdóttir — all of whom joined the club in 2025 and will be an integral part of its future.
The one who “makes it explode”: head coach Alexander Straus
Straus took the helm of Angel City in early June after winning three titles in as many years with Bayern Munich in the Frauen-Bundesliga. The head coach knew that his midseason arrival in Los Angeles would present some challenges, but he notes that he didn’t realize how significant those challenges would be.
“Maybe I underestimated that a bit because I never have arrived in the middle of the season before,” Straus recalls. “I always had the preseason.”
Things were further complicated for Straus by the NWSL’s scheduled summer international break as well as a plethora of roster changes. Thompson’s Chelsea signing was certainly the most significant, but Straus points out that the departures of Alanna Kennedy and Katie Zelem — who both moved to London City — as well the extended absences of Savy King and Claire Emslie have contributed to the lineup inconsistencies.
Straus suggests that there were some tactics he considered that could have helped Angel City make the playoffs in 2025. But as he leans back and kicks off his shoes, he emphasizes that he will not sacrifice long-term strategy for short-term results.
“We have a saying in Norway: that’s when you pee in your pants to get warm. You will get much colder in five minutes, you know?” Straus says. “And that is what we try to avoid.”
As he looks to the next season, the biggest opportunity that Straus sees is exploiting the atmosphere at BMO Stadium — a venue that regularly draws many multiples of the three to four thousand fans that his Bayern squad averaged.
“I feel that atmosphere, that electricity in the stadium… and that’s before we even start becoming really good, you know?” Straus says, adding, “I want to be the one that makes it explode.”
“Pissed off,” but with perspective: sporting director Mark Parsons
Parsons was hired to oversee soccer operations in mid-January. He was front and center in the negotiations with Thompson before her move across the Atlantic was finalized. He says that the decision from the young American superstar — who had been signed with Angel City through 2028 — left the club “absolutely blindsided.”
However, with several weeks’ distance, Parsons is focusing on the silver lining rather than the original cloud of Thompson’s departure. He claims that while the team’s top priority was keeping Thompson, he feels that with “the financial piece of this in both money received and salary cap room, we now have the opportunity to get to our goal a bit quicker.”
That goal is winning an NWSL championship. One of the key adjustments that Parsons subsequently made was acquiring Japanese sensation Hina Sugita from the Portland Thorns, spending $600,000 of intraleague transfer funds in the transaction. Parsons then acquired Zambian international forward Prisca Chilufya from Orlando in early October. During practice, he watches Chilufya intently and occasionally interrupts his train of thought to react to her firing off a shot.
As he retools the roster, Parsons explains that he is focusing on football skill but also football culture.
“It always starts with identity and what type of team that we want to be,” Parsons says. “We wanted to change our qualities on the field. We also wanted to change our qualities off the field and the character and the leadership of our group.”
Like his head coach, Parsons has next season and beyond firmly in his sights. He says the club, from owners Willow Bay and Bob Iger down to the technical staff, are aligned on that philosophy.
But he does offer a caveat.
“Please don’t take that as we are not pissed off that we haven’t won a few more games this year,” Parsons says. “We are every day. You see Alex on the sideline — every day, it’s like his first or his last-ever game. We all want to win so much. But I’m very proud that we haven’t been tempted to make decisions to help us a little bit right now.”
(Disclosure: Willow Bay, the controlling owner of Angel City Football Club, is also the Dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.)
“Being a sponge”: defender Evelyn Shores and forward Sveindís Jónsdóttir
The summer brought a fresh wave of signings for Angel City. Jónsdóttir, the Iceland international, inked with the club in late May, while U-23 women’s national team player Shores joined the team in July. Both have become fixtures in the starting lineup under Straus, with each anchoring opposite lines of a 3-4-3 formation.
For Shores, who is still just 20 years old, Los Angeles presents a unique opportunity to learn and to grow.
“Being a sponge this year, getting as much information as I can, and trying to learn the best that I can going into next year,” Shores says, listing her goals for the season. She adds that she’s cognizant of being a younger player and is focused on “learning from people with more experience and fitting in the best way I can.”
Although Jónsdóttir has a decade of professional experience, she was also thrilled to play in California after four seasons with VfL Wolfsburg of the Frauen-Bundesliga. Her former club often faced Straus’s Bayern Munich in league play, but Jónsdóttir demurs when asked if she and her new coach had much of a connection from their days in Germany.
“We needed something new, both of us,” Jónsdóttir says. “This is really, really different from where we were — far away from Germany. But I think we’re both just happy to be here and excited for what’s to come.”
Like their coach, both Shores and Jónsdóttir seem eager to prove their mettle in front of their home fans. However, the forward emphasizes that to win titles — something she achieved with Wolfsburg in 2022 — Angel City will have to improve its performance on the road.
“We play amazing when we play at home,” Jónsdóttir claims. “We’re really hard to beat at home, and we have to bring that with us to the away games and try to win them as well.”
With Jónsdóttir and Shores signed through 2027 and 2028, respectively, their individual growth and the team’s collective evolution will determine whether Angel City can return to the playoffs and contend for a title in 2026.